All of the machines used by humankind produce vibration. Vibration analysis is a process wherein these vibrational waves produced by the machines are analyzed, which helps in diagnosing the health of the various parts of the machine and thereby predict when the machine needs maintenance.
Featuring for The Business Fame’s this issue of The Most Recommended Remote Monitoring Solutions Providers 2022 is Vibration Specialty Corp, one such company that, with their remote monitoring services, is helping companies perform better.
The Company-
VSC has a rich history, being founded in 1918 by N.W. Akimoff, a Russian immigrant, who invented and patented the first dynamic balancing machine in the United States. His idea transformed the last Industrial Revolution, making it possible for companies to precisely balance machine rotors such as pumps, turbines, fans and rolls so they all operate smoothly while, more importantly, drastically extending their useful life. Akimoff solved the machinery problems for industrial titans, balancing Thomas Edison’s motors and generator as well as Henry Ford’s model T crankshafts. Furthermore, the company and its technology were so critical that, during WWII, as every shipyard in the free world had Akimoff’s balancing machines in it for the US Navy’s war effort, all the company’s employees were exempt from the draft due to their importance in supporting the war effort.
“Since then, we have secured this position as a leader in developing the most advanced predictive maintenance technologies and services.”
While developing the latest technologies, VSC provides onsite and remote monitoring of machine diagnostics and balancing for virtually all industries, such as industrial gases, pulp and paper, marine and power generation manufacturing, to name a few. Today, VSC continues its innovative pedigree in the latest Industrial Revolution by developing a new vibration streaming technology (V-Stream), using state-of-the-art instrumentation to capture extensive machinery diagnostic data for artificial intelligence, implementing dynamic digital twins to identify machinery faults much sooner so simple maintenance actions, such as timely lubrication, keep machinery operating at peak performance.
“Our technology holds over 130 patents and still counting, with a total goal of 450 patents around our technology.”
A Brief History of VSC’s Technology-
VSC’s industrial internet of things technological odyssey began many years ago when the founders of our amazing partner, Strong Force, approached our President, Jeff McGuckin, about creating products and patent ideas for the industrial IoT. At that point, VSC had numerous ideas but certainly did not have the ability or finances to patent any of their innovations. Strong Force not only had a new inventive and extensive patenting approach but, also, the financial backing to fund a massive patent portfolio. Initially, we started patenting singular ideas which have grown to an entire industrial ecosystem, covering nearly every possible aspect, including signal communications, databases, data storage, signal processing, signal manipulation, data presentation, artificial intelligence, digital twins, the Metaverse and so much more in creating a well-fortified moat around the industrial IoT.
The company’s new technologies, including V-Stream vibration data streaming, TruTwin digital twin innovation and PRiSM, are among the most advanced data signal manipulation and processing algorithms. V-Stream allows us to gather about 1000 times more data than today’s standard practices. Their vast amounts of vibration data and artificial intelligence with analytics arm them with the ability to identify correlative anomalies signifying mechanical faults in the proverbial machinery fault haystack.
“Instead of taking a discrete snapshot in time, our technology captures a long, gap-free raw data stream of 30 seconds or more.”
Since VSC captures the raw data, they can continually reprocess the data and extract faults using limitless techniques, after the data is captured, that we could not find before. The team can study the data from infinite perspectives and continually extract more mechanical issues. This new technology allows them to manipulate data and discover problems after the fact, whereas VSC’s competitors are unable to do that.
Through V-Stream, the company is changing the way industries do machinery maintenance. They are facilitating preventive maintenance, allowing organizations to spot problems and perform simple tasks, such as greasing a machine, in order to resolve a fledgling problem. Instead of trying to fix a machine in its dying seconds, they can prevent it from failing altogether. Besides the V-Stream, VSC’s team has also pioneered a digital twin technology called TruTwin, which turns typical route collection data into a true animation of the machine’s relative bearing movement based on the actual vibration vectors.
“We realize that most people have limited understanding of vibration and do not know enough to gauge the problems in their machines.”
Therefore, we have turned the complex frequency data into a simple visualization so every client can see their machine’s true motion for easier fault identification. VSC has also designed an Industrial Service Ecosystem that will be the subject of hundreds of patents and inventions and can reshape how organizations maintain their critical infrastructure by codifying maintenance and mechanical knowledge that is slowly disappearing, with trends like offshoring and the aging of the industrial workforce, and embedding that knowledge into a variety of artificial intelligence solutions.
What the Future Holds?
Currently, the remote monitoring industry is continuing to use the same snapshot technology they have used for the past 40-50 years, except they have also made it wireless. This technology predetermines the type of data it will collect prior to collection, based on historical norms. This snapshot technique captures a few very short instances in time and then averages them together in order to determine the machine’s health. Unfortunately, once this data is captured, there is no way to manipulate or improve it and that is all you get.
“Our approach captures approximately 1000X more data in its raw form so we can reprocess the data any way we wish after the collection.”
This enables limitless filtering and processing of the data in order to mine the most subtle but valuable nuggets of information, indicating machinery faults in their infancy. Marrying their technology with analytics and artificial intelligence will allow VSC to automate the machinery fault finding process so we can find the slightest issues that the team is not aware of.
“VSC will continue to work with our amazing partner Strong Force, patenting new ideas centered around our industrial ecosystem.”
The company will also look out for other partners and investors that wish to team with them in developing and using VSC’s technology for further and more rapid advancement.
“We continue to refine our technology with new analytics, data processing techniques, and ideas in order to improve our future offerings.”
The technology is new and the team is discovering fresh lessons regularly on the power in what they are doing. The post-analysis of the raw data is practically limitless, making it difficult to determine the best place to start as the team finds its way through this amazing opportunity. We continue to refine our technology with new analytics, data processing techniques, and ideas in order to improve our future offerings.
VSC’s innovations allow the team to be the Monday morning quarterback, except now they can go back in time to review the raw data where there was a machinery problem, find the anomaly in the data and forever change the results for the better.
